Dumb is not usually a good note on which to begin and end when making a movie about a criminal mastermind. And, as Law Abiding Citizen is not a comedy, it’s safe to assume dumb is not what director F. Gary Gray (Friday, The Italian Job remake) was going for with this fuzzy-morality thriller about a vigilante (Gerard Butler) out to teach some sorta lesson about justice by elaborately wiping out the Philadelphia District Attorney (Jamie Foxx), among many others, after the cartoonish psycho-dirtbag who murdered his wife and child in a home invasion gets freed in a plea bargain.

There isn’t an innocent child, a venal lowlife or a lawyer that this movie wouldn’t slaughter, rather spectacularly, for a quick fumble at audience emotions. Its series of plot cheats and limp reveals (our seemingly average family man is suspiciously professional at killing!) require a shift in allegiances so abrupt it’s as if Gray and writer Kurt Wimmer can’t decide who the hero is or if the story even needs one. (It doesn’t.) They’re not fooling anyone with those nonsense interrogation room standoffs, either.

Making Butler’s character a MacGyver/Hannibal Lecter chimera at least allows for some fancy kills. As for the rest of Law Abiding Citizen’s flawed logic and blatant contradictions: suffice it to say, none of this would’ve happened if our gadgets expert had installed a peephole in his front door.